Q&A with “Foodist” Darya Rose

Darya Rose can make a fennel salad look more tempting than a slice of tiramisu.

It’s hard to believe she once got by on SlimFast shakes and diet bars when the photo of her golden beet risotto makes you want to dig at your computer screen with a fork.

Rose is the San Francisco-based author of the book “Foodist” and the website Summer Tomato, which was named one of Time magazine’s top 50 websites of 2011. She’ll speak at a free public event at 7 p.m. Monday March 24at Russell Sage College in Troy. But first, she answered some questions about food, science and health:

Q: Are today’s young adults more food aware health conscious than previous generations? Is the situation more hopeful?

A: I think it’s definitely a lot more hopeful than it has been in the past. The most recent data I’ve seen, especially among younger generations, is a decrease in the amount of people that are dieting, and it’s not that people don’t want to be healthy, it’s understanding that dieting isn’t the method to do that. … There’s definitely a huge new focus on real food, quality food, backing off from processed foods and particularly the fake healthy processed foods — the foods that have lots of healthy claims on them but don’t necessarily live up to those wishes.

And way more people know what kale is than used for.

It’s really impressive to me, actually, how many young students reach out to me and are really engaged in this stuff. They’re starting classes. They’re learning how to preserve and can and cook their own food. Obviously, it’s not to the point where it’s universal yet.

Q: On your website, you include a timeline of your own history with dieting — growing up on SlimFast shakes and diet bars. It seems like you had a pretty adversarial relationship with food.

A: It was this constant battle to have fewer calories without being too disgusting. I’m just so glad that that’s going away, because I definitely have firsthand experience that that is a horrible way to live, and it just doesn’t work. … You have this combination now where you’re getting real health with an actual real life that you can enjoy.

Q: When did you fall in love with food?

A: The real pivotal moment was when I got really fed up with the dieting world. I had done all of it. I was running marathons, I was doing it right. I felt like I was doing what I was told was best and it wasn’t working, and at some point the scientist in me was like “pause.” I hit the pause button. In science, if you do the same thing over and over again, and it’s still not working you have to test your assumptions. … I came to a conclusion very similar to Michael Pollan’s, which is real food is clearly good. Vegetables are clearly good. Processed food seems to be really particularly bad, and the science is young and “nutritionism,” focusing on nutrients rather than whole foods gets confusing and really messes us up.

This was really hard to wrap my head around. I had been doing this my entire life — 15 years of powders and bars and shakes and all that stuff, and it was really terrifying to be honest … but I believe in science more than anything, so I’m going to start eating real breakfast. My first fear was that I was going to gain weight because if I ate carbs I was told that I was going to get fat, if I ate oatmeal I was going to get fat. Not only did I not gain weight, but I lost weight. Over the days and the weeks, my body sort of transformed, and what amazed me was that I actually loved healthy food.

Q: You have a doctoral degree in neuroscience, so you can understand studies about nutrition and our diets better than most. How do people make good choices about food, given all the sometimes conflicting information out there?

A: I don’t expect one study to get all the answers. I’m not actually saying that the science is bad. It’s all very incomplete. In order to have that context, you have to have training to be able to sort through what should and shouldn’t be assumed, based on the new data that has come to light. What I try to do for my readers is I know how hard that is, what I do is almost every Friday I go through a ton, thousands of news articles, and I end up reading several dozen of them and narrow it down to the 10 most relevant food- and health-related stories of the week, and I give a one- or two-sentence blurb on how it fits in. I constantly bring home the idea that this is still a small picture, don’t freak out. We don’t need to know every detail of any nutrient that we absorb into our body to know vegetables are still good for you.